Don't tell people "it's easy", and six more things KBin, Lemmy, and the fediverse can learn from Mastodon
Don't tell people "it's easy", and six more things KBin, Lemmy, and the fediverse can learn from Mastodon
Don't tell people "it's easy", and six more things KBin, Lemmy, and the fediverse can learn from Mastodon
https://privacy.thenexus.today/kbin-lemmy-fediverse-learnings-from-mastodon/
Reddit's strategy of antagonizing app writters, moderators, and millions of redditors is good news for reddit alternatives like KBin and Lemmy. And not just them! The fediverse has always grown in waves and we're at the start of one.
Previous waves have led to innovation but also major challenges and limited growth. It's worth looking at what tactics worked well in the past, to use them again or adapt them and build on them. It's also valuable to look at what went wrong or didn't work out as well in the past, to see if there are ways to do better.
Here's the current table of contents:
* I'm flashing!!!!!
* But first, some background
- Don't tell people "it's easy"
- Improve the "getting-started experience"
- Keep scalability and sustainability in mind
- Prioritize accessibility
- Get ready for trolls, hate speech, harassment, spam, porn, and disinformation
- Invest in moderation tools
- Values matter
* This is a great opportunity – and it won't be the last great opportunity
https://privacy.thenexus.today/kbin-lemmy-fediverse-learnings-from-mastodon/
Thanks to everybody for the great feedback on the draft version of the post!
#kbin #lemmy #fediverse @fediversenews @fediverse@kbin.social @fediverse@lemmy.ml
@thenexusofprivacy @fediverse@kbin.social @fediverse@lemmy.ml
I'm a first-wave Reddit refugee and I agree, don't say the fediverse is easy. I've been online since the early 90s and it's not an easy transition. I wish there was a map. I wish it were easier to set up new communities for chatting.
But having been through these cycles (online and IRL) before, I must say that maybe you *don't* want it to be too easy. You *don't* want to get too popular.
I hope the Reddit revolt works. I want my niche communities back.
I stated a similar sentiment elsewhere. The reason the discussions on reddit became less rigorous and interesting over time is a case of Eternal September. As you make a site more user-friendly and accessible, you actually are inviting a lot of users who are would have been unwilling to learn a slight learning curve, whether technical or social. Maybe it's remiss of me to say, but I think it speaks to their unwillingness to change their minds or being willing to view a new perspective about much.
As an older person here who was on Slashdot and left for Digg and then left to reddit, I genuinely think having a slight learning curve prevents people who would otherwise be shitposters and nothing else from joining the fray. I really would like to see high quality discussions online thrive again like they often did in the early days reddit (and where they often still do on its predecessor, hackernews), and as elitist as it is to say, I think having it be a little more technical and confusing isn't a bad thing.
Also, as an older person here, if people are willing to figure out the initially quite confusing way that Discord works, they can figure this out, too.
@dingus@lemmy.ml I strongly disagree. Most people have better things to do with their time than fight their way through buggy and confusing software. And as I say in the essay, if it were harder to sign up for Gab, would that make the quality higher? Of course not.
It wasn't really Eternal September that killed Usenet, though; it was spam, and the lack of effective means to control it — or the will to completely isolate the servers that tolerated it.
The AOLers weren't the ones with the Perl scripts emitting
buy herbal teen viagra. Rather, the new popularity of the medium made it appealing to every unscrupulous idiot with a get-rich-quick scheme. The first commercial spammers went on to publish a book about how to spam Usenet, which instructed similarly unscrupulous businessfolks to "hire a nerd" to code up a spam bot.
Don't tell people it's "easy" anytime. Anything is easy when you know how to do it. Learning new things is difficult and telling someone it's easy just makes people feel dumb and that they can't do it. Encourage folks to learn.
I was a little perplexed to begin with but quickly got the hang of it. My biggest gripe is its difficult to link to or find communities outside of your instance.
Once the community figures out instance discovery or Super communities then the adoption process will be a lot smoother.
you can use relative links so anyone can click it, like
if you view source on my comment you'll see it as
[!gaming@beehaw.org](/c/gaming@beehaw.org)
I've been trying not to say it's easy, but I can't help but want to counter the claims that it's too hard/impossible for average users.
That was me two days ago, and after a bit of confusion, it's fine. Am I an expert in federation? No. Do I need to be to enjoy Lemmy? Also no.
The two words I hate in anything remotely instructional are "Just do" (as in, "Just paste it in the search bar" or "Just pick an instance"). In 99% of cases, that "Just" there is doing so much it's almost unreal, yet most writers don't exactly see that viewpoint as they're already familiar with whatever they're writing about.
💯. With Mastodon, it turned out that "just pick an instance" was disastrously bad advice for many people -- if you pick a badly-moderated instance, or one that's widely blocked, you're a lot less likely to have a good first experience. My guess is that'll be equally true here once things get a bit farther down the line.
Just solve faster than light travel! It's easy! Go buy a faster than light drive and install it! 😉
I came here after reading a migration guide at r/redditalternatives, i just wanna say, describing the technical aspects of kbin and ActivityPub doesnt really help navigate the the kbin UI.
It's not really necesary to explain how kbin, lenny and mastodon can interact with eachother when the average brand new user doesn't know how to interact and is overwhelmed by kbin's webpage alone. Currently these platforms are being intoduced from the developer's POV and it's like being thrown to the deep end of the pool.
Anyways back to reading any and all posts i can find to figure this site out lmao
Yes almost all guides and introductions goes into activity pubs and feds. General users don’t care. Just point them to a “website” to sign up on and how to reach the content. Eventually we all will learn about the cool underlying tech.
Information overload is a very real thing for new users.
But you can't tell them how to find content if you aren't explaining to them how federation works at least on a basic level. Because they need to understand that not every community is on the server they have their account on and if they want to follow certain communities they have to search for them with this (otherwise) weird string that is somehow containing a part of another website.
Agreed. Here's a KBin FAQ from @dannekrose@kilioa.org that takes what seems to be to be a much better structure -- starting with "How do I recreate the "subreddit" experience here? " and "What are kbin "Threads" and "Microblogs?"". https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/11493/A-small-FAQ-to-hopefully-help-new-users-to-kbin
Today is my first day using lemmy on a desktop and not a mobile device. It was certainly not easy on mobile but finding and subscribing to communities was easy once I used desktop. But mobile is certainly not a good way to start. I would recommend to anyone starting out use web browser on your desktop first and then you can transition to mobile.
That is how I did it as well.
It's not easy but it's not complicated either. It's a different mindset that needs to be explained.
It reminds me of Silicon Valley when they have to explain the UI for their new internet.
Blind user. So far my experience with Lemmy is good, slightly better than Reddit. The major accessibility hurdle is some way to easily navigate through comments. Possible ideas would be using HTML landmarks, headers, or invisible (to sighted users) separators.
Wow the comments are are all nested under the same parent, without hierarchy.
See:
document.getElementById("comment-517862").getElementsByTagName("p")[0].innerText // and document.getElementById("comment-517862").parentNode.getElementsByClassName("comments")
It seems pretty easy though
The curse of knowledge is strong in all of us.
@socsa see @jdp23@blahaj.lemmy.zone's comment at https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/57856
[Also btw does anybody know why @socsa's comment showed up on my Mastodon profile here and @LadyAutumn's comment didn't?
Great points!
@thenexusofprivacy @fediverse @fediversenews if people telling lies and saying mean words are your biggest problems online you got your life stuck on easy mode.